Tim Cook vs. Steve Jobs

August 4 2025

On Friday I published a glowing book review of Apple in China by Patrick McGee. Coincidentally, on the same day UnHerd published an article by Patrick McGee, Time is running out for Tim Cook: Apple lacks strategic vision. I continue to admire McGee’s reporting, continue to recommend his book, and this new article hasn’t changed my mind about that. However, reporters who have made a name for themselves have a tendency to want to become commentators, to add their opinions to their factual reporting. In my own opinion, the opinions of reporters are no better than anyone else’s opinion. The ability to get quality news scoops doesn’t automatically make someone superior at analyzing the implications of that news. Another example of this phenomenon is Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, a prolific source of Apple leaks, unparalleled in tech reporting history; I salute his uncanny prowess as a reporter. Nonetheless, his opinions are pedestrian at best, ill-advised at worst, and I find it regrettable that Gurman’s articles sometimes muddy the distinction between his leaks and his opinions.

Back to McGee’s new article, in which he presents two comparisons, the first between Tim Cook and Steve Jobs:

Back in 2017, Apple’s former head of software, Avie Tevanian, used the metaphor to defend Tim Cook’s leadership. While innovation wasn’t happening at the same pace as it did under Steve Jobs, “they are staying ahead of the competition”, he said. But eight years on, the metaphor no longer defends Cook; it indicts him.

[…]

Today, then, marks a symbolic milestone: Cook has now matched Steve Jobs for his time as CEO — 5,090 days. But whereas nobody was clamouring for change at this point in Jobs’s reign (absent his health concerns), they are coming for Cook on several fronts.

The second comparison is between Apple and other giant tech companies:

Microsoft, mocked in Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads, now leads in valuation, profitability, and product vision. Alphabet has pulled ahead in earnings. Meta shares just hit an all-time high as the company talks up “Superintelligence”. And Nvidia, the chipmaker powering the AI boom, is sprinting so fast it’s now worth $1.2 trillion more than Apple.

[…]

The idea that Cook, who was appointed CEO in 2011, might step down was anathema in January 2022, when Apple first reached a $3 trillion market valuation. Profits during his tenure had soared 3.7 times and shareholder returns had increased twentyfold. But Apple has since stagnated. Annual revenue growth in the past three fiscal years averaged just 2.3%, compared with between 11% and 14% for Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, 24% at Tesla, and 80% at Nvidia. Apple’s market valuation is still enormous, at $3.1 trillion, but it has inched up less than 5% in three-and-a-half years.

Lord knows, I have no desire to defend Tim Cook. As my followers are well aware, I’ve criticized Cook harshly for many years, long before it became popular to call for his ouster. But I’m not an AAPL shareholder and never was. My ongoing grievance is with the way that Apple under Cook has mangled my beloved Mac platform. I don’t care about stock prices or about “artificial intelligence.” I barely even care about iPhone, except as a vehicle to sell my software. Although I wouldn’t mind if Cook were replaced as CEO, my reasons have nothing to do with McGee’s reasons.

Broadly speaking, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla are all “technology” companies. Looking more specifically, though, each company occupies fundamentally different categories of tech. Apple is a consumer computing hardware manufacturer. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. Other products that it makes, including the so-called “services,” are primarily accessories to or supportive of their consumer computing hardware: e.g., App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud. Apple’s specific product focus has remained unchanged since its founding as “Apple Computer Company.”

On the other hand, Alphabet and Meta are advertising companies. They make most of their money from selling ads, Alphabet on Google Search and Meta on Facebook and Instagram. Does McGee suggest that Apple become an advertising company? How would that fit with Apple’s hardware portfolio? Apple has already faced sharp criticism about how selling search ads in the App Store runs counter to Apple’s narrative about the purpose of the store, to protect consumers. In general, the pursuit of advertising revenue runs counter to Apple’s broader narrative about protecting customer privacy.

Is Meta even “innovative”? Meta has tried to pivot to the so-called “metaverse,” symbolically renaming the whole company from “Facebook” and continuing to pour $billions every year into the effort, yet with not much more return on investment than Apple’s own “spatial computing”, i.e., Vision Pro. And now Meta is trying to pivot to A.I., pouring a ton of money into that too, but with nothing much to show for it. We’re supposed to be impressed by Meta poaching individual Apple engineers with nine-figure pay packages, which in one sense is impressive, just not impressive in the sense of paying off for Meta. Perhaps it will pay off for Meta in the future. Or perhaps not. Meanwhile, Meta is still practically printing money at its old, core business: selling ads on social media. That’s not innovative, but it’s the only reason Meta has plenty of money to burn on other efforts.

Nvidia is the latest hot stock, or the latest bubble, depending on your perspective. Financially, Nvidia is kind of a one trick pony: it sells GPUs, for which there is currently a massive, almost insane demand. Would McGee suggest that Tim Cook lacks vision because Apple isn’t in the same business? I don’t think anyone can plausibly claim that if Steve Jobs were still alive and CEO of Apple, he would have manufactured GPUs and sold them to third parties. That’s not what Steve Jobs was all about.

Jobs did not just make tech products willy-nilly, for no other reason than to maximize profit and stockholder returns. He was always focused specifically on consumer computing devices and platforms. That’s what he cared about, and where his experienced rested. When Jobs left Apple in the 1980s, what did he do? Again, he created a new personal computing platform, NeXT, a combination of hardware and operating system, just like the Apple II, Lisa, and Macintosh that came before. Jobs was innovating… on a theme, almost like a classical composer. Jobs was eventually able to return to Apple and become CEO precisely because Jobs made what Apple needed: a personal computer operating system, NeXTSTEP, which became Mac OS X.

It’s instructive to recall that the iPod, Apple’s second hit product under CEO Jobs after the iMac, was not only a consumer electronics device but also originally an accessory to the Mac. The only way to load MP3 files onto an iPod was via iTunes. Indeed, Patrick McGee in his book “Apple in China” recounts the story of how Apple executives had to gang up on Jobs to convince him to release iTunes for Windows, an idea that he had vehemently opposed. I couldn’t stop laughing when I read this quote from Jobs in the book:

“Screw it,” he told colleagues. “I’m sick of listening to you assholes. Go do whatever the hell you want.”

Note that Jobs also had to be convinced to open the iPhone to native third-party software, which it initially lacked. Jobs presented web apps as the “sweet solution” that gave everyone else a sour taste.

Apple could try to make automobiles like Tesla, but why? Apple had no experience making automobiles. This is undoubtedly why Apple’s experiments with self-driving cars were abandoned. A company can’t just make automobiles, as one among many products: it has to be an automobile company, as its raison d’être. Perhaps the prospect of dominating the electric car market would have jacked up Apple’s stock price, at least temporarily, and Tesla has always managed to maintain an irrationally overvalued stock price relative to its revenue and profit. At present, though, the Tesla story is not quite as appealing as before. The company is struggling now with automobile sales—albeit largely due to self-inflicted wounds—and desperately attempting to pivot from direct consumer sales to a taxi service.

I feel that McGee and other critics of Tim Cook fallaciously lump Apple in with other tech companies that are not Apple competitors. Tesla is not an Apple competitor. Neither are Nvidia or Meta, or for that matter, Amazon. You have to ask what makes Amazon a “tech” company. Amazon is primarily a retailer of physical goods. It sells those goods over the internet, which was novel in the 1990s but unremarkable today. I can order food online, but that doesn’t make the restaurant a tech company. If any product qualifies Amazon for the label, I’d say it would be Amazon Web Services. This is a business product, though, not a consumer product. Something like AWS would not fit into Apple’s consumer culture and product portfolio. Is anyone suggesting that Steve Jobs would have made something like AWS by Apple? Is that what “innovation” is intended to mean?

Apple is by far the most profitable consumer computing hardware manufacturer in the world. Why are we comparing Apple to Meta and Nvidia rather than to Samsung and Xiaomi on mobile, Lenovo and HP on desktop? Perhaps those markets have become saturated and don’t provide as much room for growth as other potential markets. So what? I get the impression that commentators complaining about Tim Cook’s lack of innovation simply want “growth,” unlimited growth, without any purpose behind that growth, technology without the intersection of the liberal arts, to use a metaphor from Steve Jobs, who always had a purpose, his innovation always oriented toward consumer computing hardware.

It’s fair to view Alphabet and Microsoft as direct competitors to Apple, specifically in the consumer computing operating system market. However, Microsoft Windows revenue has long since been eclipsed by the company’s other business interests, and Android was never the main driver of Alphabet revenue, which as previously mentioned is advertising sales. The role of their operating systems for those companies is much different than the role of Apple’s operating systems. At this point, iOS vs. Android and macOS vs. Windows appears to be more or less a stalemate. In any case, I would note that none of Tim Cook’s critics in the media even care about desktop OS market share, for example. I personally care a lot, but neither I nor desktop computers are “exciting” or “trendy” for tech news media writers. Nobody says that Cook lacks vision because he’s not focused on beating Microsoft Windows. On the contrary, they would probably castigate Cook for focusing on hoary old desktop computing. It’s not the new hotness.

What would Jobs do? I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that he would do what he always did, follow his own inner voice and not jump on whatever latest technology trend the stock market speculators were trying to push on everyone else. While “tech” did ultimately make Jobs a billionaire, it was ironically not via Apple. Jobs made most of his money the “old fashioned” way: by making movies (Pixar), which predate personal computers by about a hundred years.Jeff Johnson (My apps, PayPal.Me, Mastodon) Articles index
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